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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22859365">Vigilantes Out on Dawn Patrol</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TechnicolourRomantics/pseuds/TechnicolourRomantics'>TechnicolourRomantics</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Duran Duran</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>1980s, Coping, Distractions, Hedonism, Hotels, Hurt, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, No Dialogue, Pain</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 19:02:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,385</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22859365</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TechnicolourRomantics/pseuds/TechnicolourRomantics</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Hook off one vice, hook up with another.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Nick Rhodes/John Taylor (Duran Duran)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Vigilantes Out on Dawn Patrol</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hello again! Back with some older, rougher, less fine and dandy John/Nick here. Tough times. About time I dipped lower into the Duran pool, and so wrote this smaller, darker piece, sans dialogue. </p><p>Read and enjoy! 🥀</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b><em>1989 </em> </b>
</p><p>Weekend nights left the streets dotted with life, but interspersed with slumber. Buildings of all shapes, sizes, eras and themes mixed together in an off kilter soup, packed side by side and dirtily eclectic. The mix was unnerving, the chaos of the city a breeding ground for purity and depravity, mixed together potently.</p><p> </p><p>Hotels, stay rooms, spare rooms, dotted the borders of the throbbing city's heart, places so potentially restful, relaxing… and risqué.</p><p> </p><p>Steaming, like the curling steam of a room in the far corner of the corridor of a fourth floor, in a hotel secluded in the outskirts of town, the windows fogged with winter outside. </p><p> </p><p>A beige suit piece, undergarments and ruby tie, neatly folded on the floor. </p><p> </p><p>Shimmering vest and mangled leathers thrown about next to it.</p><p> </p><p>Lowly lit by the downlight over the kitchenette, the two answering bodies were coupled on the bed beside, limbs twisted in one another.</p><p> </p><p>Locked in the room, it was a free for all, to get lost in one another and forget the rest of the world.</p><p> </p><p>Without intervention, they would've continued on the wall right outside in the corridor, acidly, against flower studded wallpaper. </p><p> </p><p>Where John had dug the exquisite curl of his tall frame, moulding over Nick's, hood-eyed and mouths sealed firmly, with a delicious, pretty tilt of the little jaw and hands sliding liberally into the blond hair, not at all afraid to pull and watch the effects.</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The edge of the drink left no more room for care in John over who saw what at this point, leaving Nick with only enough sense to pull him to his room before they became a headline.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>Shared keycards for easy access.</p><p> </p><p>It was just a one step, two step in their titillating waltz, John fumbling and tugging to loosen the tie, sliding it off Nick's upturned collar, sighing through the silk that slid along the shirt.</p><p> </p><p>They unbuttoned suits and vests, starched with sweat and hands mutually slipping under them to grab their first taste.</p><p> </p><p>There was a bittersweet beauty in the smoothly pressed platinum hair, the sweeping side part falling daintily in straight waves over Nick's face, unskewed even in the throes of debauchery, while John's swallowed him whole - pure black and mussed, framing him on the white linen.</p><p> </p><p>Luxury eluded them, expecting to ride on the coattails of their successful stage run, but the men could only feel the dinginess, the musky sweat and outdated furniture varnish, minute cracks in the hotel room gyprock closing in on them.</p><p> </p><p>But it was all lost on Nick, like any other sane person, when John flashed that killer smile under him, pupils blown, eyebrows raised, and the tempting lip curl. </p><p> </p><p>Just like the early days, the want was set off by the euphoria of the show mere hours before, though it had all been fun and games then. Now there was less fun, just more games with higher stakes, playing for livelihoods, rather than bragging rights.</p><p> </p><p>Tiptoeing around ruining a life or two.</p><p> </p><p>And John found it much easier for it to be Nick and Nick found it much easier to be John.</p><p> </p><p>Less damage control needed when they woke up the next morning. No inconvenient nameless heartstrings to break, save for a wayward Julie and Renée to call, touch and affirm.</p><p> </p><p>Too many nights alone or going through the clothes rack of unknown women left John’s mind to bring up, as it did often, images of himself as those girls onstage - sensually making their way up Nick, lips mouthing faux softly at his neck, hands all over him with bare restraint while he simpered and played on. </p><p> </p><p>Crawling all over him, feeling all over him, running their hands, polished nails scraping their biting path all over his satin vest. <em> Oh, for that to be him. </em></p><p> </p><p>Or like now. <em> To be Nick, doing it </em> to <em> him. </em></p><p> </p><p>It nearly made him forget about that beckoning tingle in his sinuses.</p><p> </p><p>Twirling his fingers firmly in the loose strands of stray blond, draped over his chest, John ignored it and Nick continued on his course, completely necessary.</p><p> </p><p><em> Anything </em> to wrestle John away from the coke. Even if it took a crashing trajectory towards him, switching him from the pull of one white vice to consuming the pale skin of another.</p><p> </p><p>Nick moved back upward, alternating between the ache of hyper-light touches, and satisfying himself, holding John still with his soft, lithe fingers clasped against his neck, controlling where they would both go.</p><p> </p><p>They revelled in the excess of touching and tasting, treading the seesaw that rocked both ways - Nick  giving John the less devastating type of high he so craved, but hedonistic in his own right. It was only characteristic of a relationship so artfully built upon widening cracks, dancing around fragile foundations.</p><p> </p><p>Pink lace lips nipped like fireworks at John’s neck while his big hands strained to hold on the blond, inching downward in a slurred caress -  feeling, remembering, learning and marking Nick’s slender, petite body above him.</p><p> </p><p>A noticeable difference in stature, but bubbles of ego and confidence were inflated enough to make up for Nick's feet, stretching to reach and touch teasingly between John’s curling toes.</p><p> </p><p>His curves, dips, notches were no longer of a boy, but were now matured, a man on him, John himself too far gone to ever truly realise.</p><p> </p><p>Absolutely high-wired atop the sighing bed, sparking on high voltage. The combustion of pleasure, erupting over them, though the looming thought of dealing with the aftermath threatened to burn through.</p><p> </p><p>It wasn’t energetic, but there was a searing need to fuel the charming illusion, time and time again, that intimate performances like these would right all the wrongs.</p><p> </p><p>That with the solid press of mouths against one another, hissing deeply with the press of whole bodies against one another, everything would be alright.</p><p> </p><p>Nick was everywhere, skin sticky against him, setting off a dark, roughened, tingle that shot through all the places where it mattered, blazing with those small hands moving south to where they mattered. </p><p> </p><p>Making John forget. Forget. And forget.</p><p> </p><p>All while they nimbly carried out their sultry handiwork, pulling his monochromatic reality along with them, trading it for luxurious technicolour and leaving his hips floundering, complicit in the buried sheets.</p><p> </p><p>His world morphed into an amalgam of colourful swirls, flashes, crosses, instead of the usual array of a card-cut white line or two. </p><p> </p><p>It'd revert back to that tomorrow.</p><p> </p><p>Again opening his eyes, faint traces of periwinkle eye makeup still painted on Nick’s face, streaked and obvious when he fixed his gaze on John’s own, only broken when their eyes flickered closed while their lips had parted with a breathy hitch.</p><p> </p><p>A guttural, sensuous request for extra air. </p><p> </p><p>Succumbing to the mind-blowing feel of one another.</p><p> </p><p>Then he pushed and withdrew, spiked hard with urgency, driving John far from reason and everything else attached. </p><p> </p><p>The addictive connection of mouth and hipbone, feeding him, fuelling the only phrase swimming through his mind - <em> more. </em></p><p> </p><p>The more incoherent John was, the further he threw his head back, the more he let go, the more Nick knew he had the reins of John’s world.</p><p> </p><p>For now.</p><p> </p><p>Somewhere, hidden away in the overgrown rose hedge of his mind, Nick knew that driving himself through to John like this, would eventually drive a brick wall between them, a metre thick. </p><p> </p><p>He shoved the thought far, far, deep. It would come back to bite him, but in the end, he only had what he had. </p><p> </p><p>Holding back the reins was hard. Feigning control of them was easy.  </p><p> </p><p>And so he desperately fixated on the blaze in John’s eyes, coming back down, no longer filled with the glassy haze of cocaine, but reflecting back at him a haze laced with Nick himself. </p><p> </p><p>As his eyes wandered to the chalky sunken cheekbones below, reality cut its unpleasant way through, bathed in toxic afterglow.</p><p> </p><p>They were sharp, all too sharp, rail thin sharp. A mocking reminder of the vice, weaseling its way into that face, never getting away.</p><p> </p><p>The powdered stuff was surely sitting somewhere in this room.</p><p> </p><p>A silent voyeur, who had intensely watched their pleading rendezvous and laughed wildly at his grasping attempts to take John back.</p><p> </p><p>How futile they would be. How delusional they were.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Title inspired by The Edge of America, which I’ve been listening to repeatedly for the past few weeks. 🖤❤ Really into the broken beauty of Big Thing lately, both as an era and as an LP. As for the song, the intimacy before Lake Shore Diving, but uneasy and troubled all the same - just like this piece I think!</p><p> </p><p>Also, feel free to suggest any prompts and respective pairings down below :) Enjoying the DD writing lately.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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